Firstly apologies to anyone who might receive this information more than
once...

The 16th Australian Geological Convention will be held in Adelaide, South
Australia, later this year (30 June - 5 July 2002), and I would like to
invite contributions to two symposia at this conference.  The AGC is a
biennial geological convention, and typically attracts some 500 delegates
from Australia and overseas.  It is run in conjunction with field trips
that repesent an excellent opportunity for overseas (and local!) delegates
to experience some classic Australian geology.

Mark Fanning and myself are convening a special symposium on "Antarctica
and East Gondwana", which is dedicated to the memory of Robin Oliver, who
sadly died last year after a long career studying the metamorphic rocks of
East Gondwana and their correlations.  Recent studies of the East Antarctic
Shield and Ross Orogen, coupled with new data from previously contiguous
rocks elsewhere are revolutionising the way that we view the assembly and
dispersal of the continents during the Precambrian to earliest Palaeozoic.
This symposium will focus on these advances in our understanding of the
various basement cratons and orogens in East Antarctica, Australia, India,
Sri Lanka and southern Africa, and the potential correlations between them.

This symposium will run "back-to-back" with the Chris Powell Symposium on
"Understanding the Earth", which will celebrate the varied contributions
that Chris made to Earth processes at all scales from cleavage development
to supercontinents.  Themes to be explored include supercontinent assembly
and dispersal, India/Asia collision and exhumation, and the tectonic
evolution of Eastern Australia.  It is being convened by Peter Cawood, Bill
Collins, and Gordon Lister.

Both of these symposia are official activities of the IGCP 440 Rodinia
project, and should run for approximately one day each.  They form two of
five sequential symposia within a convention theme on "Plate Margins and
Supercontinents".  The other three symposia will focus on Processes in
Modern Arcs, the Thermal and Structural Evolution of Continental
Collisional Zones, and Fluids, Metals and Melts in Convergenent Plate
Settings.  Other conference themes focus on the Early Earth, Metallogenesis
and Ore Discovery, and Sedimentary Systems.

Pre- and post-conference fieldtrips of relevance to the Antarctica and East
Gondwana and Chris Powell symposia include a trip to the spectacular
coastal outcrops of late Archaean to Palaeoproterozoic gneiss in the Gawler
Craton, and others to the Adelaide Fold Belt (Neoprotoerozic rift sequence
assumed to record the break-up of the Rodinia supercontinent) and the
Delamerian Orogen (Cambrian to Ordovician magmatism, metamorphism and
deformation correlated withn the Ross Orogen of Antarctica).  The
conference organizers also hope to run a trip to the Musgrave Block, a
relatively poorly studied "Grenville-age" collisional orogen in the "Red
Centre" of Australia.

Full details of the 16th AGC symposia, fieldtrips and registration
information are available at:
http://www.16thagc.gsa.org.au/.

Closing  date for abstracts (email and hard copy) and "early bird"
registration (via the web) is 28 February 2002 (FIVE weeks time).

Anyone interested in contributing is also asked to contact one of the
relevant convenors.


IAN FITZSIMONS
Department of Applied Geology, Curtin University,
GPO Box U1987, Perth, WA 6845, AUSTRALIA
[log in to unmask]

MARK FANNING
Research School of Earth Sciences, ANU,
Canberra, ACT 0200, AUSTRALIA
[log in to unmask]

PETER CAWOOD
Tectonics Special Research Centre, Department of Geology
Curtin University, GPO Box U1987, Perth, WA 6845, AUSTRALIA
[log in to unmask]

BILL COLLINS
Department of Geology, University of Newcastle
Callaghan, NSW 2308, AUSTRALIA
[log in to unmask]

GORDON LISTER
Crustal Research Centre, Department of Earth Sciences
Monash University, Melbourne, 3800, AUSTRALIA
[log in to unmask]


******************************
Ian Fitzsimons
Tectonics Special Research Centre
Department of Applied Geology
Curtin University of Technology
GPO Box U1987, Perth, WA 6845
AUSTRALIA
Phone (Direct line): +61 8 9266 2455
Phone (Dept Office): +61 8 9266 7968
Fax: +61 8 9266 3153
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
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